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When writer and Bollywood star Twinkle Khanna sat down to write a newspaper article about menstrual poverty in 2015, she couldn't have known that it would change the course of her career.

But that column led her to the story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, an entrepreneur from a small, conservative village in India, who single-handedly revolutionised menstrual hygiene - which Khanna first turned into a short story, The Sanitary Man of Sacred Land, and now a film, the comedy-drama Pad Man.

Speaking to her ahead of Pad Man’s UK release this week, it’s hard to believe she was ever so ashamed of her period that that she lied to a director and told him she had diarrhoea instead.